Hinkley: Gilbert Acosta lost his house but still lives on the property, doesn't want to leave

Gibert Acosta, 63, is living as a squatter on his own property, now living in an Airstream trailer. The new property owner is letting him stay until the house can be sold to PG&E, March 25, 2013.
Rachel Luna — Staff Photographer

Gilbert Acosta drives his 1984 Honda three-wheeler just about everywhere.It isn't street-legal, but he can figure out a back way to about everywhere, including Barstow.Acosta, a lean former Marine from the Vietnam era, is happy on the property he used to own but lost a few months ago because he couldn't pay the taxes. The current owner lets him stay there at no cost, he said.Acosta doesn't live in the house, although his mixed-breed Labrador retriever does sometimes. Years ago a gust of wind, 80 mph or more, lifted off the roof, he said.Home today is a shiny aluminum 25-foot Airstream trailer made in 1977.Like many Hinkley residents, Acosta gets bottled water paid for by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. He worries about the damage the early years of exposure to contaminated water means to his health.When his father retired from the Army at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1963, he moved the family to Hinkley because it was near a job he took at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex.As kids, he and his brother did a lot of swimming in pools near PG&E's natural gas compressor station, ground zero for the plume of chromium contamination.Acosta has been treated at the Jerry L. Pettis Memorial VA Medical Center in Loma Linda for a bone infection and has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), both of which he feels were caused by exposure to Hinkley's polluted water."I only smoked four days in my life and that was in high school," he said. He was not exposed to Agent Orange during his brief stint in Vietnam, he said.His biggest worry isn't about his health. It's that the new owner of his former house will get bought out by PG&E. Then he will be forced to leave."I've lived here so long, I don't know where I would go."